What Lot's Wife Saw (46 page)

The eve of the anniversary arrived in an anything but festive atmosphere. A cloak of listlessness and silence had draped itself over the entire Colony. The resentment of the previous week had turned into a deathly hush, the fiery animation into resigned inactivity and the violent release of emotion into an internal ache. We were marking time, waiting. Whatever might happen, it wouldn’t be good, we couldn’t do anything about it and we were ceasing to care.

Dawn brought a hammering of knocks on my door. Siccouane, a mere shadow of his former self, a wan, sleepless face atop an inkstained redingote, handed me a folder with the Governor’s instructions. “At ten, the ship carrying the tenor Regoleone, the cast and the whole company, docks. All told, forty people, and the four Star Bearers are to host them in their villas. The tenor, along with the strings, will stay with you.”

The expressionless look on my face belied the awkwardness of the demand. All official guests used to be put up at the Palace. My villa lacked the necessary space, not to mention the staff, to cope with such numbers. Siccouane added a warning that I should treat the tenor with kid gloves since he was eccentric, powerful and a close friend of the Seventy-Five. He wished me luck and went off to deliver the other folders. He shouted back over his shoulder that the six of us had to be down in the docks by nine-thirty as we were charged with Regoleone’s reception. That should have shocked me, as protocol demanded that the Governor had to receive important visitors, especially ones of Regoleone’s calibre, but I no longer had the strength.

Without answering any of her questions, I impressed upon Markella the need to transform the villa into an elegant hostel. I also sent word to Regina to send me an expensive bottle of something from the Palace in case I needed to appease a disgruntled eccentric. I made the supreme sacrifice of cutting a few flowers from my greenhouse to brighten the place up.

By nine-thirty I was standing to attention on the quayside, decked out in my frock coat and melting in the heat while squinting down forlornly at the roses, which were wilting in the cruel, stagnant, violet air. Judge Bateau, Priest Montenegro, Regina and Siccouane rounded out the party as Captain Drake was battling through sand dunes as usual.

Regina kept pinning her Star over the various horrendous stains on her linen suit, which was her only piece of clothing and was almost sticking to her skin. At least she had washed it today, but it had neither been cleaned properly nor ironed for lack of time. Behind us, in loose formation, stood the sorry remnants of the Guard’s band. They were the victims of the desert, with bandages on their faces and bedraggled uniforms. Three guardsmen held a rolled-up red carpet to be spread in front of the gangway of the ship. Beyond them, a number of passenger berlingas waited, bedecked with little flags with the joined arms of the Consortium printed on them. All this miserable company was not impressive enough to compensate for the absence of the Governor. The famous tenor would be mortally offended by being received by the Governor’s sidekicks.

I begged Regina to roll up her sleeves at least because they were black around the hems but she obstinately left them as they were. She had apparently purposefully not washed the sleeves because she claimed that they had been wetted by the water from the scuppers of the Black Ship and because they still smelt of that wholesome aroma. I bent down to sniff them but my nostrils were assailed by tomato sauce and bleach. Indignantly, she insisted that she could smell the water perfectly well and that the sleeves would never be washed.

The ship passed into the harbour, dragged by the hooks of the winch men. Her masts and lines were gaily decorated with the emblems of the Consortium. It was a pity that there were only a few indifferent dockhands apart from us to appreciate the spectacle. The colonists had heard that the Governor would not attend the arrival so they had decided to snub the event and the famous tenor en masse. They had stayed behind closed doors and drawn curtains. In fact, a group of sullen colonists had stripped the street lamps of their bunting almost immediately after it had been put up. The port had never seemed so lifeless before. Nothing looked less like a birthday celebration apart from the ship that was lit up like a street organ and anchored on the funereal quay.

The ladder came down. I called to the three guards to hop to it with the red carpet. They clumsily unrolled it and carelessly stomped on it, leaving dusty boot marks on it. The captain stood at the top of the ladder and respectfully saluted the great tenor as he showed him the way down.

Regoleone, who was as square as his leather trunk, with a double chin, a black toupee and fingers encrusted in rings, warmly thanked the captain and turned to greet the crowds. The five of us clapped with extra vigour.

The sound of our clapping eerily reverberated around the empty buildings. I desperately signalled the band to commence but the guards, preoccupied by their bandages, failed to start up synchronously. Fingers that had been mauled by the endless planks in the desert could not work the buttons and the keys and one of the drummers dropped his drumstick. As he lunged to retrieve it he bashed into two trumpets and, in turn, they produced some remarkable squawks, which threw the rest of the brass into complete disarray as some launched into the crescendo. They had to turn the page to restore order. Meanwhile, descending the ladder to this discordant accompaniment, the tenor perplexedly waved at the empty quay.

I went up to him, introduced myself and welcomed him to the Colony. He irritably asked where Governor Bera was. I hadn’t prepared for this obvious question so I just muttered that he couldn’t be here. I proffered the two limp roses and he looked at me with obvious disgust. I explained that I grow them with extreme difficulty and that the vessel had taken too long to tie up. He threw them aside and asked me to take him to his quarters as he’d been totally worn out by the journey.

I picked up my poor roses, which I nurture with sweat and tears, and placed them carefully in my coat. I led him to one of the bedecked berlingas.

We arranged all the transportation of the luggage and the berlingas set off in ceremonial formation for the villas. The empty streets and the drawn curtains deeply offended the famous tenor since this was the last thing that our employers had prepared him for in Paris. When we got to the villa and I’d shown him his room and bathroom, his famous, cultivated voice was released in all its splendor, cracking one of my mirrors. I’d neglected to instruct Markella to remove the jar with my caterpillars from the bathroom and the other one with the mummified spiders from the bedroom. He screamed that the accommodation was completely unacceptable. I begged him to calm down and promised that the upstairs bathroom was for his exclusive use only. He stormed downstairs demanding that we remove him at once from this dump but the luggage berlingas had already started to unload and there was no way that he could pass. A mountain of double basses, cellos and suitcases blocked his path. The third cellist was leaping over the luggage, arranging for its distribution to the rooms since my staff couldn’t tell a violin from a viola nor to whom they all belonged. The first violin threatened physical violence to anyone who dared touch his Stradivarius; the first cellist was scratching away at his allergic reaction to the violet atmosphere; and the rest were complaining about the beds, the lack of amenities and the violet dust that covered everything.

I suggested to Regoleone that he should withdraw until the uproar subsided but he was adamant that he wouldn’t spend another minute in this house. I asked him to allow me to at least lead him to my conservatory where I had an excellent Chianti waiting for two cultivated Italians to appreciate. The tenor’s face underwent a welcome transformation as his eyebrows rose in anticipation. Chianti had become extremely rare after the Overflow. Bless Regina, who had rooted out the one and only bottle the Governor’s cellar possessed. I knew quite a bit about Regoleone’s life and knew he was a true Tuscan and so had calculated that he’d succumb to the memories that the red wine of his cruelly inundated homeland would awaken. The first taste should cleanse his mind of the bathtub, blackened by the agricultural chemicals, and the next should wash away the remaining horrors. Indeed the magic was already working since, after a few moments’ silence, he asked where I was from. I explained that my roots where in Umbria but I had grown up in Rome and that if I hadn’t absented myself to attend a medical conference in Copenhagen I would have drowned along with the Via Veneto. He smiled bitterly and confided that if he hadn’t left Milan for a Scandinavian tour he would have been swimming with the fish through the shattered, stained-glass windows of the Duomo. He rearranged his toupee that’d been knocked askew in his fury and asked me to lead the way to the nectar of his vanished home.

We went down to the conservatory and Markella was ready with a plate of cheeses and a pair of my best glasses. Regoleone settled back into the wicker chair, oblivious of the worn cushions and the wobbly table. We’d be sharing the Colony’s last bottle, and I don’t know whether there were any still left anywhere else in the world but there are no more here. I drew the cork with a flourish and allowed the red wine to breathe and to lace the air with its heady bouquet. After a deliberate delay, I filled our glasses. Regoleone brought his glass under his nose and shut his eyes, allowing his sense of smell to lead him on a nostalgic tour of the hillside vineyards of his homeland. After the first few drops slid down his larynx he totally surrendered. He relaxed, spread out as far as the chair would allow him and was lost in the shimmering red hues of the wine. The memories of the morning’s reception receded with each sip. I reminisced about the nights out in the back streets of Rome, the pranks we’d got up to with the female medical students at university and the moonlight on the Piazza Navona. Unfortunately, wine, women and my unbounded ambition made me reckless and if the Overflow hadn’t swept my despicable transgressions away like a well-bribed judge, I would have ended up in jail.

Regleone mellowed enough to match my confession with one of his own. He revealed that he had been a mere singer in the chorus of Milan’s La Scala, but when the Opera House submerged along with its city, any Italian who had sung there became a sought after commodity. His career had taken off like a rocket. From being a complete unknown, the name Regoleone now graced famous theatres and auditoriums.

Reassuring himself that his wayward toupee was in position he said sadly, “I am like that bottle of Chianti, Fabrizio. Esteemed and valuable, not because I sing better than the others, but because I am the last of my kind. ‘Italian tenor from La Scala, Milan’ is a phrase that’ll never again appear in a performer’s résumé once my generation becomes history. I am a collector’s item. The crowds come to see me rather than hear me even though I’d never set foot on the centre stage in earnest, only dreamed about it from the wings. The Overflow changed everyone’s perspective. Rarity seems to outweigh other values and tragedy intrinsic quality. Pain sank into our judgement like alcohol and it clouded it.”

I admitted that he wasn’t wrong, values had taken on a new hierarchy. For example, I mechanically incinerate hundreds of bodies that fail to survive in the Infirmary but I go crazy with despair when a carnation that I have been acquainted with for but a few hours succumbs to the inevitable and wilts. The life of my plants is infinitely more important than those of my patients, perhaps because it is so short.

“Perhaps because it is so futile,” corrected Regoleone, and he coaxed the last few drops of wine into his glass, shaking the neck of the bottle greedily so as not to let the minutest quantity go to waste.

“The violet salt destroys plants and I feel a peculiar urge to protect them,” I explained.

Regoleone shook his head.

“No, Fabrizio, what you’re doing here is very different. We protect things in the environment they were meant for; it is obvious that plants, insects and animals don’t belong in the Colony. You insist on bringing them here to die while deluding yourself that you’re keeping them alive. If you loved them, you would have left them in their natural environment.”

His words, delivered so unequivocally, delighted me and, for a moment, I believed that the skies had parted and accepted my prayers. I leant closer to him and I asked in a conspiratorial manner if I could request his assistance in a matter of tremendous importance. There was something beautiful, precious and innocent in the Colony, completely out of its natural environment, that was being destroyed by the polluted air. I couldn’t say how this magnificent object had arrived here but I was one of those guilty of this crime. It must immediately be transported to clean sea air because otherwise its days were numbered. I had no contacts in the outside world, I didn’t know anyone in one of the civilised countries, but he was an influential performer of world renown, with innumerable contacts, who rubbed shoulders with Heads of State, businessmen, bankers, people in power. Regoleone rushed to put my mind at rest, saying that he would gladly put the plant in his luggage and take it to Europe.

“It isn’t a plant, it is a sailing ship,” I explained.

Regoleone burst out laughing. “You’ve got a weird sense of humour, Fabrizio!”

“You wouldn’t be laughing if you had seen it dying.”

“Oh, my friend, but you are truly suffering!”

“Like I have never suffered before in my life. If I fail to free the ship, I am unworthy to continue living and, certainly, I should never have been born.”

Regoleone’s gaze rested carefully on my face.

“Fabrizio, if I’ve understood correctly, not what you are saying, but what you are trying to tell me, then definitely I will not help you. You, whose medical conscience accepts the suffering of thousands of people in this hellhole; you, who stacks corpses in the Infirmary without shedding a tear; you, who has no pity for the plants and bugs that you bring here for your gratification, denying them the company of greenery and the benefits of oxygen; and you who gained from the Overflow which swamped our country and its history, are exactly like me. An empty bottle of Chianti. If then, in the midst of the doom and despair of your existence, and the obscene opportunism you wallow in, something has appeared to shock your comatose conscience into awakening, then the best thing I can do for you is nothing at all. The expiation that you desperately seek cannot be gained by proxy. You say that you are personally responsible for the entrapment of some ship. I don’t really understand what you mean, but if you are, then set it free. And I’ll liberate my own ships, if I am ever lucky enough to feel that I must do so. I envy you. To this day, I have never felt such a noble desire.”